The Arby's Fry Size That Gives You The Most Bang For Your Buck

Fast food is all about instant gratification. If you're craving something delicious, want it quickly, and don't want to think twice about how much it costs, fast food is the answer. Whether you have a go-to fast food order or enjoy getting adventurous and digging into new offerings, it's worth remembering that there are lots of hidden hacks to get the most out of your order. Fans of the iconic roast beef chain, for example, can sample off-menu items once they know the secret to ordering Arby's Super Roast Beef Sandwich. A particularly useful tidbit is knowing which size side to get with your order to get the most bang for your buck. While Arby's curly fries fall somewhere in the middle of the pack in our fast food french fry ranking, you still want to get as many of those twisty, heartily seasoned bites as possible for your dollar.

We did the math, looking at the amount of fries Arby's puts in its small, medium, and large orders and how much they each cost. Since prices vary across the country, we used pricing from Phoenix, Arizona, where the cost of living is close to the national average. Our findings show that the large order does give you the best bang for the buck, while the small serving costs a whopping 50% extra for the same curly fry when compared to the large! That said, there are other factors to take into account when looking at how much you're shelling out for fast food.

Getting more fries per dollar in bigger servings isn't novel. In fact, you'll see it in fast food orders, household products, and many more places. Often, this is done on purpose to get consumers to buy more, and it's called the decoy effect. A person may only require a certain amount of a product (in this case, delicious Arby's curly fries). However, the restaurant's pricing makes getting a larger serving such a better deal that it seems almost foolish to get the smaller serving. After all, who wants to pay 50% extra for their curly fries, even if the free sachets of Arby's legendary Horsey sauce make them feel upscale?

If you look at it in absolute values, the decoy effect-inspired large serving may not seem as appealing. Even if it's a better deal, a large serving has a higher price, and you ultimately end up spending more. If you're only hungry for a small amount of fries, you'll still save money ordering the small serving even though you're paying more per fry.

While not the case with Arby's, sometimes it's the medium serving that can give you the best bang for your buck. In an X (formerly Twitter) post, a user titled Everyone's Favourite Jim did an in-depth calculation on McDonald's fries and found that if you bought five medium servings of fries, you actually got more fries at a lower cost than if you bought four large servings.